1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to telephone services supporting conference calls and, more particularly, to arrangements for improving convenience of joining conference calls to leaders/owners and participants thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Meetings of groups of individuals is considered essential to decision making in many business and other circumstances and generally are much more expeditious than negotiating through correspondence, including electronic messaging. In the past, meetings were usually conducted in person although finding a convenient time and place for all desired participants often proved difficult, even when meetings were relatively infrequent and the number of groups with whom an individual might meet were relatively few. However, at the present time, the need to conduct increasing numbers of meetings with more numerous groups has led to the increasing popularity of virtual meetings through so-called conference calls over the telephone. Such conference calls have become increasingly sophisticated, often including video images of participants and/or illustrations of material presented and discussed. Such meetings are also often used for educational purposes as well as business purposes such as seminars, professional continuing education courses and the like.
However, conference call services must be applied for and set up in advance and call-in numbers and pass codes unique to each conference call owner or caller (i.e. the person or entity who establishes the conference call and the call-in number and pass code are common to all conference calls established by that person or entity) are sent out and forwarded to the intended participants in the conference call; requiring numerous communications and the retention of the call-in number and pass code information, often for extended periods of time before the conference call actually takes place and which may be subject to error for that reason.
The possibility of error and the effort required to retain call-in numbers has been somewhat ameliorated by the increased usage of electronic mail and certain computer programs such as electronic calendars such that a single e-mail including conference call schedule, call-in number and pass code can be sent to an entire group of desired conference call participants (who can then individually indicate whether or not they will participate in the conference call) and thus transfer the conference call information (e.g. the call-in number and pass code) to their respective electronic (or paper) calendars. However, even this procedure is not entirely convenient since a person participating in the call will need to keep the electronic (or paper) calendar open at the time of joining the conference call to access the call-in and pass code information which interferes with access to information which may be needed for the meeting. This problem is often exacerbated by the practice of operators providing in-country dial-in numbers (and pass codes) in order to save costs for users but which essentially require a conference call to join yet another conference call. The time required to do so may also be a problem when conference calls are tightly scheduled. The retention of the call-in number and pass code in the calendar of an intended participant also compromises security of the conference call since it is the nature of electronic calendar arrangements to allow access generally to other computers or terminals connected to the network in order to convey information about unscheduled periods of time in a user's agenda.